


Mankind Should Have Been My Business

by DesdemonaKaylose



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Friendship/Love, M/M, Meta, Other, Prose Poem, if this seems familiar it's probably because you saw it go around on tumblr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:47:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28412643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: A list of mechanisms whom Megatron has loved
Relationships: megatron/multiple characters
Comments: 7
Kudos: 37





	Mankind Should Have Been My Business

**Author's Note:**

> title from Dickens

A list of mechanisms whom Megatron has loved:

  * Crunch, a shift supervisor in shaft 1-b, who taught Megatron what it meant to live in the dark, how to sing drinking songs, how to sleep on a healing weld, and how to say goodbye (but never how to mean it)



  * Impactor, a friend who was too bullheaded to watch his own back, let alone Megatron’s; who, nonetheless, always insisted that he would, until the day that he could not



  * Terminus, who taught him to let go—and then, very admirably, furnished his first practical demonstration in the art



  * Optimus Prime, who saved his life, although Megatron would not love him until well after Optimus had tried his best to correct that mistake



  * Gladiatorial Participant of bout 736 cycle 340, Grune, who walked into the arena like one who had seen the steps up to their own waiting guillotine and had decided to wink saucily at the executioner, for, indeed, what else now could be done to him?  
  

  * Deadlock: a fine bargain for any pawnbroker
  * Ravage: a fine pawnbroker in his own right



  * Soundwave, who always knew better than to draw too close, or presume too much; who therefore was safe to love, and more importantly, to trust—and Megatron, for all his hubris, understood at least that everyone must trust _someone_ , so you had better make the decision with care



  * Starscream, who was so many things; bitter, petty, brilliant, jealous, insatiable; Starscream, foremost of all his enemies and dissidents; Starscream, who was the easiest of them all to manipulate, because he cared so much, because he cared so much for Megatron’s regard be it good or ill; Starscream, whose hatred made Megatron feel more God than mech, elevated and electric and invincible—and whose testimony, at the 11th hour, had for the first time in 4 million bloody glorious years made Megatron at last feel small, and absurd



  * Minimus Ambus, who expected so little, and yet was so often disappointed; who was so easy to please with so little effort, and yet who would not have been moved with all the riches or treasures or conquests of the cosmos; Minimus, all right angles in a garbled, tangled world



  * Rodimus Prime, who lied for him, even after everything; a hot coal star burning in a secret pocket of his armor plating; careless and vain and haunted, lover of losers and misfits, patron saint of the lost and lonely



Was there someone else? He is sure there was someone else. It will come back to him, one moment.

A list of mechanisms that Megatron should have loved, but did not:

This list is long, 5 million years long, a graveyard of blue sparks beneath a mirrored sky; an army of splintered spark cases. But who remembers each frail blue flower, now, when all the ground is blue on blue?

Today, truncated for brevity to three most dire names, a list of sins whose loveless birth and monstrous faith are writ large and bloody across the accounts of time—a bill come due at last, for the buying and selling of souls:

Damus, Glitch, Tarn

A mech must love the monsters that he makes. 


End file.
